Typically, there are three Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) display methods: transmissive, reflective and transflective.
In transmissive LCD a backlight module transmits light through the panel to display the images. In other words, this type of LCD uses its own light source to provide light. Therefore, when the ambient light is brighter than the light provided by the backlight module, the display image is not clear.
In a reflective type LCD, a reflective film is coated on the down glass substrate of the panel to reflect environmental light. The ambient light is used as a light source. Therefore, when the ambient light is dim, the display image is not clear.
A transflective type LCD is developed to resolve the above problems. The transflective type LCD has both transmissive type and reflective type characteristics. When the ambient light is strong, the transflective type LCD acts as a reflective type LCD and uses the ambient light to display image. When the ambient light is weak, the transflective type LCD acts as a transmissive type LCD and uses the backlight module to provide light to display the image. Therefore, this transflective type LCD may be used in conditions with different ambient light.
However, different cell gaps have to be formed in a transflective type LCD to make the reflective region and the transmissive region have the same optical characteristic. In other words, the cell gap in the reflective region is half of the cell gap in the transmissive region. This process for forming different cell gaps is very difficult and easily to reduces the yield.
Therefore, a transflective type LCD that may resolve the above problems is required.